Passionate Intelligence
Passionate Intelligence

Author: Arieh Sachs

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1421435403

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Originally published in 1967. Professor Sachs shows the inner coherence of Samuel Johnson's thought by pointing out the interconnectedness of his remarks on religious, moral, aesthetic, political, and psychological subjects. Reason and imagination, the central concepts in the Johnsonian ethos, are elucidated with reference to "vacuity," "attention," "novelty," "diversity," and other words to which Johnson attached special significance. Johnson emerges as an original thinker of the English Christian-humanist heritage; he "is to be read in the same spirit as Pascal." Primarily concerned with the relation between Johnson's ideas and the long tradition of which they are the culmination, Sachs also emphasizes the relevance of Johnson's thought to the twentieth century.

The Passion for Happiness
The Passion for Happiness

Author: Adam Potkay

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780801437274

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Although widely perceived as inhabiting different, even opposed, literary worlds, Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and David Hume (1711-1776) shared common ground as moralists. Adam Potkay traces their central concerns to Hellenistic philosophy, as conveyed by Cicero, and to earlier moderns such as Addison and Mandeville. Johnson's and Hume's large and diverse bodies of writings, Potkay says, are unified by several key questions: What is happiness? What is the role of virtue in the happy life? What is the proper relationship between passion and reflection in the happy or flourishing individual? In their writings, Johnson and Hume largely agree upon what flourishing means for both human beings and the communities they inhabit. They also tell a common story about the history that led up to the enlightened age of eighteenth-century Europe. On the divisive topic of religion, these two great men of letters wrote with a decorum that characterizes the Enlightenment in Britain as compared to its French counterpart. In The Passion for Happiness, Adam Potkay illuminates much that philosophers and historians do not ordinarily appreciate about Hume, and that literary scholars might not recognize about Johnson.

Samuel Johnson: An Analysis
Samuel Johnson: An Analysis

Author: Charles H. Hinnant

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1988-04-25

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1349192082

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In this provocative and incisive book the author re-examines Samuel Johnson's major texts, focusing on his famous review of Soame Jenyns's A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil as a principal source of insight and innovation. He offers a lucid exposition of its ideas and methods, defining for the first time its relation to an important strand in eighteenth-century intellectual history, and assessing its implications for Johnson's moral vision. Hinnant's book will be an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding what is most modern in Johnson's thought and writings.

Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson

Author: Samuel Johnson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-09-30

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 0674054075

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Thanks to Boswell’s monumental biography of Samuel Johnson, we remember Dr. Johnson today as a great wit and conversationalist, the rationalist epitome and the sage of the Enlightenment. He is more often quoted than read, his name invoked in party conversation on such diverse topics as marriage, sleep, deceit, mental concentration, and patriotism, to generally humorous effect. But in Johnson’s own day, he was best known as an essayist, critic, and lexicographer: a gifted writer possessed of great force of mind and wisdom. Writing a century after Johnson, Ruskin wrote of Johnson’s essays: He “taught me to measure life, and distrust fortune...he saved me forever from false thoughts and futile speculations.” Peter Martin here presents “the heart of Johnson,” a selection of some of Johnson’s best moral and critical essays. At the center of this collection are the periodical essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler. Also included are Johnson’s great moral fable, Rasselas; the Prefaces to the Dictionary and his edition of Shakespeare; and selections from Lives of the Poets. Together, these works—allied in their literary, social, and moral concerns—are the ones that continue to speak urgently to readers today.

The Philosophical Biographer
The Philosophical Biographer

Author: Martin Maner

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0820333743

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The Philosophical Biographer shows how a shift in philosophical outlook in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-from an understanding of human knowledge rooted in deductive certainties to one resting on inductive probability-influenced the development of biographical narrative in general and in particular the way Johnson dealt with biographical evidence in his Lives of the Poets. Examining the psychological and philosophical doubt that lay at the heart of Johnson's character and intellect, Martin Maner reveals in the biographical studies of Savage, Swift, Milton, and Pope an ingrained pattern of dialectical argument and a skeptical attitude toward evidence--a method that involves the reader in judgments about the poets as it conveys Johnson's own understanding of truth. In the Life of Savage, Johnson moves from thesis to antithesis, generating out of opposing emotional responses--irony and sympathy, ridicule and pathos-an understanding of the man. Dialectically undercutting the conclusions of previous biographers of Swift and Milton, Johnson fashions a new, somewhat acidic estimation of Swift and a portrait of Milton that engages contemporary questions of the probable and the marvelous. The Life of Pope, Johnson's greatest dialectical achievement, alternates between blame and praise, public and private realms, weaving tone, context, and analogy into great, contrasting patterns of inquiry and judgment. Establishing the centrality of a dialectical method in the Lives of the Poets, Martin Maner links the rise of biography as well as Johnson's interest in the form to the shift in epistemology brought about by empiricism. In the new patterns of thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, biography--the estimation of a life through sifting of historical events and evidence--was the most philosophical of endeavors, and Johnson its greatest practitioner.

The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson
The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson

Author: Jack Lynch

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-22

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0198794665

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No major author worked in more genres than Samuel Johnson--essays, poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, scholarly editing, lexicography, translation, sermons, journalism. His works are more extensive than those of any other canonical English writer, and no earlier writer's life was documented as thoroughly by contemporaries. Because it's so difficult to know him thoroughly, people have made do with surrogates and simplifications. But Johnson was much more complicated than the popular image of 'Dr. Johnson' suggests: socially conservative but also one of the most radical abolitionists of his age, a firm believer in social hierarchy but an outspoken supporter of women intellectuals, an uncompromising Christian moralist but also a penetrating critic of family structures. Labels fit him poorly. In The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Johnson, an international team of thirty-six scholars offers the most comprehensive examination ever attempted of one of the most complex figures in English literature. The book's first section examines Johnson's life and the texts of his works; the second, organized by genre, explores all his major works and many of his minor ones; the third, organized by topic, covers the subjects that were most important to him as a writer, as a thinker, and as a moralist.

Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson
Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson

Author: Leopold Damrosch

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780299123840

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During the second half of the eighteenth century, the most powerful literary work in Britain was nonfictional: philosophy, history, biography, and political controversy. Leo Damrosch argues that this tendency is no accident; at the beginning of the modern age, writers were consciously aware of the role of cultural fictions, and they sought to ground those fictions in a real world beyond the text. Their political conservatism (often neglected by modern scholars) was an extensively thought out response to a world in which meaning was inseparable from consensus, and in which consensus was increasingly under attack. Damrosch finds strong affinities between writers who are usually described as antagonists. The first chapter places Hume and Johnson in dialogue, showing that their responses to the challenge of their age have deep similarities, and that their thinking points forward in significant ways to twentieth-century pragmatism. Subsequent chapters explore the interrelationship of the fictive and the "real" in a wide range of works by Boswell, Gibbon, White, Burke, and Godwin. In its combination of literary, philosophical, and cultural criticism, this book will appeal to scholars in many fields as well as to nonacademic readers interested in intellectual history.

Johnson, Writing, and Memory
Johnson, Writing, and Memory

Author: Greg Clingham

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-09-05

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0521816114

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Examines Johnson's writing in relation to eighteenth-century thought on literature, history, fiction and law.

This Invisible Riot of the Mind
This Invisible Riot of the Mind

Author: Gloria Sybil Gross

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1512802298

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In This Invisible Riot of the Mind, Gloria Sybil Gross contends that Samuel Johnson was a pioneer in the development of modern psychological thought, challenging the timeworn, stilted typecasting of Samuel Johnson as the pious Christian moralist. Instead, she argues that Johnson was a daring, at times irreverent, explorer of human nature, who strenuously rejected old relics of sanctimony and repressive authority. To make her case, Gross draws on a wide range of materials from Johnson's life and works, as well as from eighteenth-century medical psychology. Throughout, she is scrupulous in analyzing Johnson's psychological thought within the cultural idiom that would have been available to him. At the same time, she employs a classical psychoanalytic approach, that seeks to establish a coherent relationship among Johnson's life, his fantasies, and his creative work. This reading of Johnson reveals the radical direction of his investigations of mental experience, which put him in clear prospect of the basic premises underlying Freudian psychoanalysis. Gross argues that these premises—the principle of psychological determinism, the view of the mind as dictated by forces in conflict, the concept of the dynamic unconscious, and the submerged power of desire in all human activity—pervade Johnson's writings. Gross demonstrates not only that Johnson can profitably be read in psychoanalytic terms, but that Johnson is a psychological theorist of primary importance. This original and insightful work will be of interest to students and scholars of English literature, eighteenth-century studies, and literature and psychology.